We had a touristy 2 days in San Diego by going to the world famous San Diego Zoo and visting an aircraft carrier. Of course the zoo was great fun, we got to see silverback gorrillas, grizzly bears, pandas, panthers and the list goes on. Most of the animals seemed active and quite happy, but them some looked plain bored and maybe slightly demented by their enclosed spaces. The grizzlys were probably the best since they were playfighting to the delight of the crowds.

The aircraft carrier USS Midway was decommissioned after the Gulf War after serving since 1945, and is now set up as a fully functional muesem in the San Diego harbour. In just over an hour, we managed to squeeze in a lot on the floating fortress. We saw the engine rooms, jail (brig), main hangers, flight deck, pilots ready rooms, the captains and admirals quarters, and the war room. On the flight deck there was a huge variety of planes and helicopters that have been used over the last 30 or so years. San Diego seemed to be the home of the US navy, we came across a lot of people travelling on "orders" at the airport. While we were in the states there was alot of bad press about the northern borders of Mexico and the US Govt issued a travel warning for about the first half of our itinerary. Basically the drug cartels which traffick into the US were shooting each other up a little more than usual, but there had been reports of a few kidnaps etc so we got cheap flights to Mexico City and skipped out the bad lands. We've reworked our plan a bit so now we get to see the southern pacific coast and get to spend more time at the beach and in the arty little towns of Oaxaca and Chiapas. so its all good! Plus we think now our original plan may have been a tad ambitious in the amount of ground we intended to cover...perhaps more time on the bus getting there than actually looking around???? So the new plan helps us work on our tans haha.